Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No ...

If I say that I used to be very afraid of Enoch Powell, I think a certain proportion of Literary Review readers will guess what I mean. To be a socialist in the 1960s was to know that, even as the ...

Laugh? I thought I’d never start. Penelope Gilliatt’s To Wit is a promising enough idea – a celebration of comedy and the philosophy of laughter, by an elegant and erudite writer. Unfortunately, ...

After Napoleon, Marie Antoinette is probably the most famous French historical figure in Britain, even though she was originally Austrian and he was Corsican. At an early age, however, both left home ...

Last December, Donald Trump reacted furiously when the climate activist Greta Thunberg was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year. He was still griping about it in January, when he complained to ...

Steve Richards’s new book is an engaging survey of modern prime ministers. These leaders – from Harold Wilson to Theresa May, whose defenestration is alluded to in skilful late additions – qualify as ...

Something terrible seems to happen to David Cornwell (alias John Le Carré) every time he leaves England or, to be generous, every time he leaves northern or eastern Europe. Give him a drizzle-sodden ...

‘Populists are rebelling not only against a specific (liberal) type of politics but also against the replacement of communist orthodoxy by liberal orthodoxy,’ write Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes.

Protect them Lord in all their fights, And, even more, protect the whites. (From ‘In Westminster Abbey’) Historians of the Second World War have increasingly seen it as a gigantic showdown between the ...

There is not enough fiction in Hollywood and that’s a fact. Not enough Hollywood either, for that matter. Do not let the title of Gore Vidal’s new blockbuster fool you into thinking that it belongs – ...

Some novels are hard to review, some are easy. Some are so difficult you don’t know where to begin…but, then, a gift: the author saves you the trouble by more or less reviewing the book for you. So ...

Anyone who believes that Gorbachov’s reforms can really change any thing would do well to ponder the contents of this book. Communism, according to Stefan Staszewski, is ‘the rule of the minority over ...